by Donna Hylton
Inside the closet with him, I decide that little piece of light coming in from under the door means hope and possibility. It means that beyond the dark, dangerous closet, there is light somewhere else—and one day, I can get to it. It means that I have a light inside myself that Roy can’t touch or put out no matter what he does. I focus on that sliver of light until I disappear into it and feel nothing and nowhere—least of all, in this closet.
Each night, when Mother returns home from work, Roy is down the hall working with leather or playing his acoustic guitar. “What points have you earned today, Donna Patricia?” Mother asks me, as she sets her bags onto the floor and unwinds a scarf from her neck.
“I’ve done all my homework,” I tell her.
“Excellent. And?”
“I practiced the clarinet.”
“What else?”
Actually, there is another accomplishment that I’d like to share with her: the track and field coach at school has asked me to join the school team. One morning during phys ed class, Miss Berry approached me. “I think you’d make a great competitor,” she said. “Would you like to join the team?”
Maybe, I told her, but I probably wouldn’t be allowed.
“I’ll speak to your parents anytime they’d like,” Miss Berry said. “You have talent that shouldn’t go to waste.”
“I should say, I don’t quite see the point in all that,” Mother says when I ask her. “I’d sooner see you focus on your academics. It’s brains that really get a young woman places, you know.”
It’s my running that could really get me places, I want to tell her. Maybe even away from here.
When I share my mother’s decision with Miss Berry, she calls Mother and makes the case that my running has the potential to get me into top universities when the time comes.
“What kind of equipment would be necessary for us to purchase for Donna?” Mother asks her.
“Not a thing,” Miss Berry tells her. “The school will supply everything she needs.”
That’s when Mother finally relents. Miss Berry gives me a school uniform and running shoes, and she eyes her stopwatch closely while I run. I sprint so hard, so fast, that within days I’m crossing the finish line before the rest of the team. “Give us one of those magic runs of yours,” Miss Berry always tells me.
Magic. The second my toe touches the start line, I’m above my body, soaring direct as a hummingbird.
When my name begins to appear in local newspapers for beating runners in my district, Mother and Roy still don’t budge from the bedroom to appear at my meets. At night, Miss Berry drops me off outside our building, and I creep into the dim apartment and down the hall slowly to find the two of them sitting up in bed. Roy makes a concentrated effort to keep his eyes on the television, while Mother glances up at me over her glasses as she holds an open book against her ribs. “Well?” she asks. “How did it go?”
“I came in first.”
She raises her eyebrows and lowers her eyes back to her book. “Well done,” she says.
I wait for the night when she’ll rise out of bed, hug me, kiss my head… and tell me she’s proud of me. Good job, Donna Patricia. These four words are all I want. Instead, from behind her book she says, “The program you like is on.” I lean against their bedroom doorway, watching Within These Walls about a prison full of female inmates who are trying to survive after being punished, often unfairly, for crimes they committed, sometimes unknowingly. How can they live like that? I wonder. I’m hooked on this show because I believe the way the women overcome their struggles might reveal answers for how I could overcome being trapped inside this home.
“Would you bring in the tea, please?” Mother asks me. I pull my interest from Within These Walls to turn and walk slowly toward the kitchen. I feel lonely, abandoned, just like the characters on the show. I wish for my mother’s love… for her encouragement…
And I wish most of all for a lock on my bedroom door.
In the evenings, Roy makes a plate of food and takes his dinner into their bedroom. With me at the dining room table, Daphne eats hurriedly before wiping the edges of her mouth and dropping her napkin on her plate to return to her work. “When you’re through cleaning up the kitchen,” she asks me, “would you please prepare the tea?”
As I finish my plate, my only company is the clink of my silverware against china, the ticking of the clock on the kitchen wall. One night, I can no longer take the loneliness of living in their home for each of them to use me to get what they both need. As I crouch under the sink to search for the dish soap, I spot a box of boric acid with a cartoon image of a dead mouse on it. I stretch my neck to listen for any footsteps approaching, and then I spill a spoonful of rat poison into each cup. I pour the tea and let it steep, stirring in extra sugar to cover up the taste of the poison.
I start down the hallway and walk into their bedroom. Both of them sit up, preparing to take the cups from my hands. Suddenly, I stop in my tracks. I spin around and head back for the kitchen.
I can’t do it.
“Donna Patricia!” Daphne calls after me. “What are you doing?”
“I made it wrong!” I call over my shoulder. I pour the tea down the drain. As I splash water from the spigot around the sink, I feel sick. I can’t believe I even attempted it. See, Donna? I tell myself. You’re bad. You deserve everything that’s happening to you.
No matter how much my adoptive parents have hurt me, I can’t hurt them. At twelve years old, I know that I’m not someone who can harm someone else. I take two clean cups from the cupboard and prepare another pot of tea.
2
GOLDEN CHILD
Inside the closet, I continue to focus on the light that streams beneath the door each day. When I try to resist Roy’s beckoning toward the closet, he begins to threaten me with scissors and knives, just as I saw him do to my mother right after they first brought me here. He’s begun to hold me against the wall and put his hand on my throat to the point where I can’t breathe.
Staying away from home is my main motivator to train so obsessively. Out on the track, I’m not someone’s servant. Here, I am someone.
In seventh grade, I win district-wide running competitions. In the fall of eighth grade, Miss Berry names me captain of the team, with a girl called Nancy my co-captain. Physically, we are opposites: Nancy is short and muscular, while my limbs are long and lean. What we share in common, however, is that we are both reserved until the stopwatch starts. There’s something about competing against one another that brings out a respect between the two of us. No matter what emotional struggle I may be dealing with, my finish time is always an objective fact. Nancy and I always know where we stand with each other, and even though we’re competitors, we both acknowledge that we’re on the same team. Nancy and Miss Berry are the only two people in my life I can trust.
As co-captains, we run against other New York City students at various meets around the city. A big opportunity comes when we both qualify to compete in a meet to be held at Madison Square Garden. I come in first, and a small local newspaper calls me “the fastest girl in the Bronx.” Nancy is always gracious, cheering me on with high fives and encouragement.
At practice, the whole team screams for me as Miss Berry watches the clock. “Gogogogogogogogo,” she says as I blow past her, doubling over at the finish line to catch my breath. Then I stand tall and clasp my fingers behind my head, victorious. Running is the single thing in my life that makes me feel powerful when, at home, I’m nothing more than that helpless child inside Roy’s closet.
With Nancy, I earn a spot to compete at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in the prestigious Colgate Games, the nation’s largest track competition for young girls. “This race will be big, Donna,” says Miss Berry. “You’ve got to place first or second. People are looking at you. Do you think you’d want to be in the Olympics?”
“The Olympics?” I let this sink in. “Are you serious, Miss Berry?”
“Very serious. Olympics
scouts have their eyes on you. If you want to go, then we have to get serious about your training. We’d have to enter you through track and field, and you’ve got to start training on the hurdles.”
“I’ll do it,” I tell her, accepting any chance to stay out of the house. These hurdles will be nothing compared to what I’m living there.
Every day, I devote myself to training and practice on the hurdles, knowing that running could quite literally be my real escape from my life at home. But it’s around this time when during the day, I begin to see shadowy figures leap out in front of me. I jump back, trying to fight and push them off. “Donna?” Miss Berry asks me on the track one afternoon. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I assure her. If there’s anyone in the world whose confidence I need, it’s Miss Berry’s. However, the situation reaches a critical point the night before the semifinals. I’m running to represent our entire district, and Miss Berry says a lot of good scouts will be there. I have to win this. The night before the meet, my duffel bag is already packed with my uniform and sneakers and sitting next to my bedroom door, waiting for morning to arrive. But late that night, Miss Berry calls with the worst possible news. “I’m terribly sick with the flu,” she tells my mother. “Please tell Donna I’m so sorry I can’t take her to the meet.”
Mother comes into my bedroom and shrugs coolly. “I’m sorry, Donna Patricia,” she says. “Miss Berry promised us that she would be your ride anytime you had a meet.”
In despair, I ask her: “Will you take me, just this one time?”
“Absolutely not,” she says. “And neither will your father. The agreement was that if you want to run, your ride wouldn’t be our responsibility.”
This race is everything to me. It’s not often I show emotion in front of Roy and my mother, but here, I begin to cry. I beg them. This means everything to me, and it wounds me so deeply that Roy can hurt me the way that he does and not even take this one opportunity to help me in the way that matters most in my life. Their lack of support crushes me more than anything I’ve ever experienced. Running is the only thing that makes me feel normal. This is my proudest accomplishment.
When I don’t show up for the race, we lose by forfeit.
The shadows continue to jump out at me in the daylight. At night, I jolt awake from dreams where Roy is standing next to my bed, staring at me while I sleep. After school, I try to take my time getting home… but that doesn’t stop Roy from summoning me into the closet before he hears Mother’s key inside the front door.
We must learn to find our own solutions. I continue to search for answers or some way out, often sliding the Bible off the bookshelves to seek some comfort in God’s word. Not even that can make sense of what I’ve experienced every day for the past three years. I can’t find the answer in the Bible or anywhere else, so I go to the only other place I can possibly think of: the school counselor’s office. I knock on her door, hoping I can find the solution here. “Can I help you?” she says.
“May I please speak with you?”
“You may,” she says. “Is it a private matter?”
I nod, unable to look her in the eyes.
“You can close the door,” she says. “Have a seat.”
I slide myself tentatively into the wooden chair across from her desk and look down at my hands to share with her: “I need help.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t take it anymore.”
“What can’t you take?”
“My father keeps hurting me.”
“I’m sorry, Donna… I’m not sure I understand.”
“He takes me into the closet,” I tell her, “and I don’t know what to do.”
“Does your mother know this is happening?”
I shake my head. No. “I don’t know how to tell her.” The real truth that pulses inside me is that I’m the one to blame.
“Would you like me to call your mother and tell her all this?”
I nod. If Mother will just let me have a lock on my bedroom door, I could lock him out and stay there peacefully for the next few years, until I’m old enough to live somewhere else.
The counselor slides open a heavy metal file drawer and pulls out my file with a gesture of great purpose. She picks up her telephone and begins to put in a number, each spin of the rotary dial holding my full attention. I sit upright and stare at the square white tiles in the ceiling, on edge, but hopeful. I know that this singular moment could change everything—I only hope it will be for the better.
The guidance office is so still that I can hear the other line ringing through the counselor’s earpiece. I stay calm, but am filled with tension. After a few seconds, I realize that I need to remind myself to breathe.
“Mrs. Hylton?” says the counselor. “I have your daughter here in my office. She’s shared some information with me that I think you should know about. Right—she says her father’s been hurting her.” I watch her side of the conversation carefully. “That’s correct, it seems he’s touching her inside the closet?” She goes silent for a moment, nodding along to the other side of the dialogue. “Mm-hm. Mm-hm. OK.” She holds the phone out to me. “Your mother would like a word with you.”
She’s finally going to hear me and allow me to have a lock on my bedroom door. “Yes?” I say into the phone.
“Donna Patricia!” I startle at the screech of my mother’s voice in my ear. “Why are you making up these lies?”
“I’m not lying!” My conviction comes out strongly at first.
“How dare you? Why would you make up these stories?”
By now, I’ve crumpled in the seat, hope quickly deflating. “But I’m not lying.”
“You know what happens to people who lie?” she says. “They get caught, and they spend their lives in prison just like those women you watch on that television program!”
I’m telling the truth! I want to tell her. You must know this is happening!
“You listen to me,” she continues. “If your father finds out what you’ve done, you know he’s going to be very angry.”
Immediately, I know she’s right. My face caves into silent tears. All of my courage has disintegrated in an instant and suddenly I’m ill with fear.
“Donna Patricia, are you there?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Pardon me?”
“Yes,” I force with my only remaining strength.
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
I say the only thing I can think of: “I’m sorry.” With these two words, I’ve given in. I’m wrong. I’m the one who’s bad.
My wrist is limp when I hand the phone back to the guidance counselor. “Is everything OK now?” she says.
Disillusioned and now with no one to turn to, I tell her, “Yes.”
I hadn’t considered this outcome even as a possibility: neither the counselor nor my mother will believe me. Dazed and nauseated with pain, I walk alone to the restroom outside the gymnasium, which is the only place I feel safe and familiar enough to let it out. “Help me!” I scream. “HELP ME!”
Standing over the sink, I look in the mirror… and I see Roy’s face. “No!” I cry. “LEAVE ME ALONE!” I turn to the window, but also there his face peers back at me. A burst of raging pain comes out of me, and I cry out.
Suddenly I look down, and there’s shattered glass around my tennis shoes and blood dripping from my right hand. I look back up at the window, where Roy’s face had just been, and I can only add the details together: I’ve punched my hand through the window and sliced a piece of my flesh off my wrist. I place my hand under the sink to rinse the blood with cold water, then hurry to wrap tissue and paper towels to make a bandage for my arm. I kneel quickly, focusing through my tears to pick up the shards of glass that fell on the floor.
Then I rush out of the school’s side entrance. When I arrive at home, Roy waits at the door. “How dare you?” he snarls in my face. “I told you that no one would believe you! What are you trying t
o do, mess up stuff between me and my wife?”
I cruise past him toward my bedroom, taking a seat on my bed to try to figure out what to do. I’m playing a clarinet solo in the school band concert tonight. My mind races as I try to work out how I’ll change clothes to be ready in time.
Just then Roy blasts into my room and squeezes his hands around my throat. Choking, unable to breathe, I try to rip his hands off of me until two of my fingernails manage to scratch his face. He rocks back in shock. “You made me bleed, you little bitch!” He stares at the blood on his hands, then goes into his bedroom and slams the door.
Likewise, I rise and close my bedroom door, even though he doesn’t allow it. I look outside, the late summer sun still blazing hot. Even though the rest of the kids in the school band will wear their short sleeves with our uniform at the concert tonight, I choose the long-sleeved shirt to hide the cut on my wrist. I know that I’ll look different from everyone else. I am different from everyone else. It’s as though today’s events give me no choice but to live with this.
When Mother arrives at home, my bedroom door bursts open like thunder. “Are we clear?” she says. “Do you understand what I said to you earlier?”
Accepting the blame, I don’t look at her.
“Did you hear me?”
Still unable to make eye contact, I nod.
“I never want to have another phone call like that, Donna Patricia. And aren’t you expected to play your clarinet tonight? Come on,” she says. “I’ll take you.” Her offer to accompany me is not proper parenting. It’s damage control to assure I don’t spout off to anyone what’s happening at home.
I play my clarinet in formation with the band, always the dutiful schoolgirl doing what is expected. But far beneath the cut on my skin, I am so deeply wounded. Locking my lips around the mouthpiece of the clarinet strengthens me not to cry. My adoptive parents won’t listen to me, and neither will the school counselor, but in the concert audience there’s a sea of faces I don’t know. Aware that Mother must be sitting somewhere out there, I sit up straight in my chair when my solo arrives. I play the music with more concentrated focus than I ever have in my life. When the song reaches its final note, the audience breaks into applause. I imagine that they’re cheering for me, cheering to have just heard what’s inside of me.